UBhave: ubiquitous and social computing for positive behaviour change

Mobile phone users are expected to exceed 5 billion in 2010 and the use of online social networks is soaring (Facebook alone has more than 500 million users). Today's mobile phones represent a powerful computing platform, given their ability to sense through a variety of sensors (e.g. accelerometer, Bluetooth, microphone, and magnetometer), their processing and communication capabilities. Phones are part of everyday life, and therefore represent an exceptionally suitable tool for investigating behaviour and promoting behaviour change, while social networks provide a valuable source of data about user preferences and social interactions. This proposal will investigate the power and challenges of using mobile phones for behaviour change interventions. This will involve tackling the challenges of measuring many aspects of human behaviour through power-limited mobile phones as well as integrating the information extracted through the phones with social data gathered on online social networks.Digital Behaviour Change Interventions (DBCIs) are interactive, automated packages of advice and ongoing support for behaviour change, which typically include: personalised advice based on responses to questions assessing needs, circumstances and preferences; support for goal-setting, planning and progress monitoring; automated reminders and progress-relevant feedback and encouragement; access to social support by email, online forums etc. DBCIs can be used for a wide range of different behaviours; for example, to reduce risky or antisocial behaviour, increase productivity in the workplace, enhance learning activities, or support environmentally important lifestyle change, such as reducing energy use. DBCIs are a relatively new method of supporting behaviour change, as the technology to support this kind of personalised interactive support is only now becoming available. They provide scientists with a means of carrying out detailed assessments of the process of behaviour change from a much larger sample of the population than has previously been possible.Traditional DBCIs have mainly been delivered by PCs and provide feedback to users based on their answers to questions about their activities and feelings. Our aim is to use mobile phone technology and online social networking applications to gather this kind of information during daily life without the need for users to answer questions. Mobile phones can be employed to sense whether the user is active, their mood, and who they are with or talking to, while online social networks can provide information about users' attitudes and social contacts. This information can then be used to deliver exactly the right kind of messages to users at the right time, depending on what the user is doing and feeling.We will work closely with users to develop ethical, acceptable and practical methods of measurement and behavioural intervention. We will then demonstrate and experimentally test the capabilities, performance and effectiveness of our tools and techniques by developing a range of DBCIs to address a major public health problem, weight management. We will recruit very large samples of people to try these DBCIs from our 'MyPersonality' population of 3 million Facebook users who have previously taken part in our studies. We will develop new methods to analyse the information we gather across time and space from a very large number of people. We aim to develop an in-depth understanding of how and why different people react to and use different intervention components. This will help us, and others, to design more popular and helpful DBCIs in the future.The tools we develop will be designed to be easily reusable and adaptable by others for different types of behaviour change. To ensure that a wide multidisciplinary community can benefit from the tools and methods for behaviour change that we develop we will provide extensive online educational and training materials, workshops, and exchanges.

Our proposed work will provide the framework and support needed for sustained digital intervention development in the academic, public, private and third sectors, and hence our technological innovations will also have direct economic impacts. We have a track record in making our software available as open source, and five teams around Europe and the US are already building on versions of our existing socio-psychological intervention software. Our research outputs will have the potential to support the production of commercially significant enabling technologies and services in this area for commercial companies. A number of companies have shown enthusiastic interest in our proposed integration of mobile sensing with social networking and our platform for creating behaviour change interventions, as these innovations will dramatically enhance the efficacy, versatility and dissemination of applications that promote positive behaviour change and personal growth (see letters of support from our industrial partners). This means that a potentially unlimited range of interventions could be developed more cheaply, rapidly and effectively than at present. Digital behaviour change interventions are a powerful and cost-effective means of promoting desired behaviour, and can be used to target behaviours that can enhance public services or improve health and/or quality of life. For example, the LifeGuide software that this proposal will develop further is already being used to develop interventions to: reduce obesity in primary care and promote weight loss in the Royal Navy; help people from disadvantaged backgrounds stop smoking; train and support GPs, nurses and other health professionals; help foreign students adjust to university life; reduce transmission of respiratory infections (including pandemic flu); and support self-management in the home of symptoms (flu, eczema, irritable bowel) and serious conditions (high blood pressure, stroke). Our specific interventions also have the potential for extensive and rapid economic and societal impact within a 2-5 year period. We will focus on the development of a set of interventions directly addressing a huge and growing public health problem: weight management. We will work closely with the target user groups throughout the development of the weight management interventions, carrying out in-depth qualitative studies to ensure that the interventions fit with users' lifestyles, needs, abilities and preferences. We will then immediately test their acceptability and effectiveness in substantial samples of users; this will include inviting participation in the interventions from the 3 million current users of the Facebook psychological testing application 'MyPersonality', and promoting participation of the general population through high profile press releases. Once shown to be successful, the interventions will be rolled out at virtually no additional cost to everyone with online access within or outside the UK (for example, health-related digital interventions could be rolled out through the UK NHS Choices website). Through our planned steering group, workshops and publicity activities we will ensure that the interventions and software are designed to meet the needs of potential users and are disseminated as widely as possible (see Pathways to Impact). For example, members of our steering committee include Dr. Bob Gann, Director of NHS Choices (the web portal for the UK National Health Service), Hein de Vries, a Professor of Health Communication with who plays a leading role in creating and testing digital public health interventions in the Netherlands, and Professor Munoz, who is engaged in a programme of work to disseminate all health-related interventions internationally in all languages. Our EmotionSense work on mobile phone sensing has received considerable media coverage, highlighting the interest of the community at large in tools devised to understand and help behaviour change.